George River Solo 2018
Day 15
Start Time: 7/29/2018 0:00 AM
Duration: 0:00
Distance / Total (km): 0.0 / 188.1
I woke up at 11:00am, poor quality sleep, not at all motivated; decide to turn this into a layover day instead of a short day. I am moving slowly, took more than an hour to make tea and dig out a fresh brick of cheese, split a wrap, half with cheese and the other half with jam. There is regular thunder but no rain since last yesterday evening, the humidity continues to be very high. It is becoming very stuffy in the Pod but every time I go to open up the screens a look at the sky has me thinking that rain will arrive at any moment. There are very few bugs around so I spent a little time outside cleaning up and organizing the “garbage duffle” (I have one bag that is dedicated to fuel canisters, overflow food and accumulated trash). I set up the Marmot so that I could have a comfortable bug free sleep; it also made more room in the Pod so I could really spread out. The thunder seems to be getting closer, at 1:45 the dark band of rain clouds that had been lurking far to the west arrived, the wind picked up, temperature dropped and the rain began. I stepped out to take a couple of pictures before scurrying back to safety. The worst of it lasted 20 minutes, wind and heavy rain combined with thunder and lightning. For the next hour there was only moderate rain, the temperature in the Pod fell more than 10°c during the storm making things much more comfortable. After 90 minutes it was all over, the sun emerged, I finished my outside sorting chores before getting out my fishing rod.
Now I am a complete hack when it comes to fishing, on most trips I don’t even bother. On my 2008 trip on the DePas / George the two guys I was with were there as much for the fishing as anything else and it is nothing less than spectacular. In any event, I do enjoy eating fish so I will dedicate 5 or 10 minutes to the effort before giving up. I paddled over to the bottom of the rapid and started casting into the pools below. I had a nibble but mostly just caught up in the rocks. I was about to give up when something took the lure. In what seemed like an instant, it was gone…..along with my lure, not sure if the line snapped (amateur failure to replace with virgin line) or a bad know (another amateur failure). In any event, that was the end of the fishing!
I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting out food supplies for the next 4 days to go in my 30 lire barrel, redistributing my food supplies amongst the various bags, and attempting to reduce the size of my 115 litre dry bag (aka: green monster) so it would be possible to properly seal it. I am now in the rapids so there is always a chance of upset.
There is distant thunder and a band of dark cloud to the south, I am hoping it will pass by, overhead the sun is blazing down on the Pod, I have all the screens open so it’s comfortable. Predicting the short-term weather in this part of the world seems impossible, it can transition from clear to stormy and back to mostly clear in a flash.
At 7:30pm, I made a bag of Three Cheese Lasagna (Alpine Aire), spiced it up with some crushed chili, not bad, and made another round of tea to go with cookies. By 10:00pm, those dark clouds and thunder still emanated from the south while it remained dry and very pleasant at my camp. I ordered up a new weather forecast, it called for light rain overnight and tomorrow with increasing winds for the next two days and changing direction to what will likely present some headwinds. I did some quick snacking on salami, cheese and chocolate and a last smoke before heading over to the Marmot for the night. It’s only 11:15, a really early night for me, perhaps a chance for an equally early start tomorrow. This would be a good plan; there will be rapids tomorrow including at least two R3’s that will give me a better feel for water levels. I always have a bit of nervous anticipation when hitting the first major rapids of a trip and in this case I know I had a dump and minor swim in 2010 somewhere in this general area.
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